RFK granddaughter dies at family compound
BOSTON — Authorities said Friday they are looking to toxicology reports for clues to the death of Saoirse Kennedy Hill, a granddaughter of assassinated presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.
The Kennedy family confirmed the death in a statement after police responded to a call Thursday afternoon about a possible drug overdose at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.
Hill was the daughter of Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s fifth child, Courtney, and Paul Michael Hill, who was one of four people falsely convicted in the 1974 Irish Republican Army bombings of two pubs. The two are now divorced.
“She lit up our lives with her love, her peals of laughter and her generous spirit,” the statement said, adding she was passionate about human rights and women’s empowerment and worked with indigenous communities to build schools in Mexico.
Hill attended Boston College, where she was a member of the class of 2020. The college issued a statement Friday saying she was a communications major and “a gifted student.”
“She was also active in the College Democrats, and had many friends on the BC campus,” spokesman Jack Dunn said.
The Cape & Islands district attorney’s office said Barnstable police responded to a home “for a reported unattended death.” Barnstable police and Massachusetts State Police detectives were investigating. The district attorney’s office said Friday that Hill was taken to Cape Cod Hospital, where she was pronounced dead. It said an autopsy showed no signs of trauma, and that toxicology reports would help determine the cause and manner of death.
Audio of a Barnstable police scanner call obtained by The Associated Press said officers were responding to a report of a drug overdose.
“The world is a little less beautiful today,” the family statement quoted Hill’s 91year-old grandmother and RFK’s widow, Ethel Kennedy, as saying.
Hill had written publicly about her struggles with mental health and a suicide attempt while in high school. “My depression took root in the beginning of my middle school years and will be with me for the rest of my life,” she wrote in a 2016 column in The Deerfield Scroll, the student newspaper at the private school in Massachusetts she attended.
One of Hill’s relatives, former U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy, who is now an advocate for substance abuse and mental health treatment, tweeted in tribute to her Friday.
“Saoirse will always remain in our hearts. She is loved and will be deeply missed,” he wrote.